I recently changed our telephone service to one of those unlimited long distance calling plans. It finally dawned on us that the entire rest of America already had switched to this feature. Meanwhile we've been paying for a long distance plan that let us place calls for 10 cents per minute thinking it was all we could afford with our limited budget. We finally came to the realization that we were being royally screwed. Embarq (Sprint) has been charging us 10 cents per minute to call everywhere outside of a 10 mile radius of our home. A 10 minute call to my wife's job a mere 15 miles up the road was $1.50. A 20 minute call to my dad's house only 30 miles down the road was $2.00. And yet those non-existent calls we never make to Alaska, Wyoming, or New Mexico could have be placed for that same 10 cents per minute.

So we've now arrived in this brave new world of the late 1990s. The real kicker was that in order to qualify for the $15 rate for adding the additional service, we had to downgrade to a cheaper basic package that has the same features we already get. So our phone bill will probably decrease by $5 or $10 from the $65 we've been paying monthly. And for paying less money, now we can make all the calls we want to anywhere in America for as long as we want for free. So to all my scattered friends and family, know that only a house full of 3 crazy kids can now serve as my excuse for not calling more often! I shall do my best.